How to Be the Most Believable Marketer in Your Industry

A short while ago, I wrote a post discussing one of three key marketing principles discovered and well-documented by the Eureka! Ranch (Overt Benefit). I’ve gotten a lot of feedback since, and thought it would be worthwhile to complete my review of all three principles as we should all have them at the forefront of our minds as we undertake our work.

The second principle speaks to the skepticism that all of us feel when confronted with marketing.  Let’s face it… life experience has taught us to believe little of what we hear from marketers.

For this reason, strong statements of benefits – no matter how compelling – fail to move people to action without the help of REAL reasons to believe what you’re saying.

The benefit is what your offering.  The reason to believe is HOW you’re going to make good on the promise.  We simply have to provide both.

As I watch the marketplace today, I find that this issue – the real reason to believe is the greatest weakness of new business concepts.
(more…)

How Can We Make Our Prospects Believe Us?

If only they would believe everything we say. How easy selling would be.

After years of being conditioned to believe that marketers are liars (and sales people are worse), we as consumers have evolved into a very skeptical breed.  Sadly, our skepticism is often validated and reinforced by real-word experience in the marketplace.

So what do we do about it?  How do we differentiate ourselves and our message as simply being believable?  If we can figure this out, we’ll sell more (online and offline).  We’ll increase our conversion rates.  And we will be more profitable.

(more…)

How We Judge Books… and What You Should Do About It

We’ve all heard the age-old admonishment. Don’t judge a book by its cover.

What a joke.

In a time when we are all subject to constant information overload, there literally is no time to judge a book – or anything else for that matter by anything more than its cover.

Thankfully, it appears that we human beings are intuitively equipped to make snap judgments with shocking accuracy. If you doubt this point, pick up a copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink (The Power of Thinking Without Thinking). In it, he shares countless examples of people reaching amazingly insightful conclusions with seemingly almost no data on which to base their positions.

So why do I raise this issue?

(more…)

Beware of What You Know

For several years, I’ve been working on the development and launch of a consolidated electronic health record for consumers. This is a challenging undertaking for reasons I’ll likely share in a future post. But something happened that prompts me to write on the danger of familiarity.  I see it all the time in product development, marketing, sales system development, and even among entrepreneurs raising money for new ventures.

We were presenting a beta version of our portable health record to a group of first responders (EMTs). When you launch the health record, one of the first things you see is a collection of pictures of everyone whose records are on the drive (i.e. a family).  You then click the picture of the person whose records you wish to view. This is a practical feature in an emergency where the patient may not be conscious because it allows a visual verification of whose records a doctor is viewing.

(more…)

Teach a Man to Fish… And He’ll Still Want You to Fish for Him Tomorrow

Brian Korte is an artist pioneering a new and fun medium.  He builds mosaics – big pictures – out of LEGOs.  You can find him in the Guinness Book of World Records in connection with his craft.

I can remember the time he told me he was working on his first one – a portrait of two of his friends who had recently married. With limited expectations, I took a look, and WOW! pretty darn cool!

What’s really interesting about his LEGO art, is that once you understand HOW he does it, unlike other forms of art that so often require freakish talent, most anyone could do this with his level of precision.

He has leveraged this sense of attainability to create a following of enthusiasts. Kids can (and do) actually help him complete his work.

(more…)